As for education spending, I've always said it should be cut and prioritized. The idea that money allocated to education actually goes to educate kids is a sick joke in this country.
I've never understood this thinking. If schools are wastefully spending money allocated to them, you cut the funding, further hurting children?
There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it. Public schools are a favorite whipping boy for those with money/power, and of course the system isn't perfect, but the benefits it provides still far outweigh the negatives. The vast, vast majority of teachers in our public schools are responsible, intelligent people who have a love of teaching and want to positively affect the lives of children, just like the vast, vast majority of children in the public school system are good kids who want to learn and succeed.
We whine and bitch about the dumbing down of America, laugh at Idiocracy becoming real before our eyes, yet funding for schools are reduced or cut at nearly every opportunity, teachers are criminally underpaid and forced to purchase their own paper and other supplies, while simultaneously hearing how lazy and apathetic they are, school districts are ordered to arbitrarily improve test scored or risk losing what little funding they receive, while being given no new resources to purchase the equipment or hire the staff they need. We leave our children to these people for 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, we trust them to educate our young, to feed and care for them, often to act as surrogate parents, all the while giving them the bare minimum required to perform this task, and griping or outright refusing any request for more.
If you have such a problem with the way public education is run, then get involved for fucks sake. Join the PTA, run for a position on your local school board. Find out what it's really like, chances are you'll end up being shocked that these schools do as good a job as they do with what little they have to work with. Pound for pound, you're not going to find a group of people who work harder, care more about their jobs, or complain less about their working conditions than teachers.
You know I have to admit, finding out that there is an MMO out there that supports this level of cooperation, strategy, and espionage is almost shocking. If I was heavily into games like I was a few years back I would definitely be checking this game out.
My first stop would be back to the store I purchased it from.
Yeah good luck with that. The store isn't going to take it back because it's open box software. You can talk all you want about DRM licenses but the mouth breathers at Best Buy aren't going to care.
Is all that really going to be necessary? People pull old Trash-80's or whatever out of closets and get them to work, and that's been 15-20 years maybe. Assuming the storage is kept cool and dry, I can't see any reason why the hardware wouldn't be usable after 50 years. Maybe throw in some extra RAM and a cloned HD as a just in case (or just two PC's).
As far as power goes, surely standardized power is embedded well enough at this point that at the very least adapters would be available in 50 years. Think about it; you probably wouldn't think twice about trying to plug in an old television from the 50's would you? Unless Vulcan's land tomorrow with a ship full of antimatter reactors I can't see us abandoning 110 anytime soon.
With the likes of iTunes and Amazon offering DRM-free music that you can play on any device, why would anyone choose the MSN Mobile service?
There may well be people who just want to listen to the track on their mobile alone.
Yeah and there may well be people with severe OCD who purchase music from your store and then immediately delete it because the bits didn't download in the right order, but I wouldn't bet the farm on chasing that demographic.
Jesus, they seem to be basing the whole thing on the hope that they can trick people into thinking they have to buy music from the MSN store if they have a Windows Mobile device. What the hell is that shit about "loyal to MSN". What? If anyone uses MSN it's because it came up by default in IE and they're too stupid to figure out how to change it. My mom might use MSN, but you can be damn sure she's not going to be buying music for her mobile phone anytime soon. Way to know your audience there pal.
Good grief, someone needs to post a 24 hour guard by this guy, Ballmer is going to disappear his ass posthaste.
Schools prefer to use Windows because it's what the vast majority of their faculty and staff know, it's what the vast majority of their software runs on, and it's what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world.
One wonders why they didn't just put Microsoft, Cisco, and Oracle on the list. Jebus, I know all of those companies have hit a rough patch of some kind or another, but do you really think Symantec, VMWare, and freaking McAfee are going down? They as much as admit it in the summaries for each one, pretty much every one says "Highly unlikely" or something to that effect.
Oh noes, it took up almost 2 cm of your screen when you opened Slashdot, and perhaps as much as 3 minutes of your opening morning avoid-work browsing to view the video, however will you recover from such trauma?
It just needs to realize what it's core consumer group is: people listening in cars.
Let me paint you a picture. I live in Wichita, America. Here are my choices for radio when I drive to work in the morning:
- Local sports show - Local news show - Bob and Tom - Walton and Johnson - Todd and Tyler - Kid Cratic - Local soccer mom-friendly morning zoo team - Whatever the hell the hip hop and country stations are playing
That's pretty much it. Half those nationalized shows I don't really even have a clue about besides hearing their ads run on the drive home, but that's enough to tell me I want to have nothing to do with them. Even during the day it's not much better. We have a couple of what you would probably call "adult contemporary", a rock station that redefines the term "playlist", and of course the requisite "classic rock" station where I can hear Hot Blooded for the 90th time. The only "alternative" station who would even bother to crack a White Stripes CD once in a while closed up shop in favor of Mexican radio, literally. In other words, Wichita radio is a farking wasteland.
Sat radio was a God-send for me when I got my new vehicle a few months ago. It came with three months of free XM, and even though Lucy played way too much Offspring, it was light years better than the alternative. Since the merger of stations I haven't had time to form much of an opinion, but what I've heard so far sounds pretty much the same to me.
You can talk about iPhone this and iPhone that, but I'm not really willing to buy an iPhone, or any other phone for that matter, just to have streaming radio on me, particularly when the only time I care about the radio is when I'm driving to work, and would rather listen to the car radio anyway. Yes MP3 players and CD's are an alternative too, but even they get stale after a while, especially when you're like me, spending all my free time looking after two newborn girls; I don't really have time anymore to go actively searching for new music I might like.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that the lettuce on the Wendy's Double Stack isn't really that impossibly green and crisp, and the Glade plugin won't instantly make my entire house smell like a rose garden.
It's a commercial people. They have 30 seconds to show you what it can do. It's your responsibility as a consumer to research the product if you're interested in buying it, determine what it's strengths and limitations are. Not just run right out (literally) and buy it because it looked fast and shiny in a commercial.
But that does not mean there is not a problem here.
My mom has taught 1st graders for ~20 years. Back when Power Rangers used to be the shit, she would talk about how these kids would get all riled up playing Power Rangers during recess. When they got back into class, they were still all keyed up from their "fighting" between each other and would always get in trouble.
Does this mean Power Rangers causes violence in children? Of course not. But it does remind us that children can be excitable and impressionable, get caught up in the games they play, and sometimes don't realize when it's time to stop, or take the game too far. What they are doing before they exhibit this behavior is really immaterial: they might do this with a video game, a movie they see, a cartoon, or a couple of sticks they find in the gutter and play "sword fighting" with.
You have to set limits for children. Limit their diet of video games, TV, and other media, and let them know when their behavior related to this media consumption becomes unacceptable. Parenting 101.
Are the pork barrel last minute additions to the $700 billion buyout package for this kind of stuff? NASA doesn't have lobbyists? No congressmen from Florida or Alabama have this kind of pull?
Just because I don't have a fancy "doctorate" or even "college education", doesn't mean you can just dismiss my theories! Einstein didn't go to college after all, look where he ended up!
I'm telling you, my theory is solid. I saw this show on the History Channel the other day that was talking about what kind of propulsion UFO's might use, and it came to me: What would happen if the Earth's magnetic field happened every 780,000 years and 300 days, exactly? That would mean it would happen again in November! Our only hope is to align every source of magnetic material in the world along north-south magnetic lines! I've already done this with my stove, fridge, and just to be safe my wireless network. I encourage all of you to do the same!
I am not crazy people! My scientific theories are backed up by some of the finest dramatization programs the Discovery Channel has to offer!
The fact that music labels don't (or perhaps don't want to) see what they might be doing by forcing Apples hand here is just amazing. What's to stop Apple from getting into the record label business to support iTunes? Like they couldn't sign a thousand acts tomorrow if they promised them prime promotion in the iTunes Music Store? They might not be able to get the big names right away, because of existing contracts or just general reluctance from artists, and they would certainly lose most if not all of their back-catalog, but Apple absolutely does have the kind of capital necessary to pull this off, and a huge built-in market that is essentially tied to their wildly popular distribution mechanism.
Losing big name artists from major labels would certainly hurt iTunes sales, but again, Apple certainly has the kind of cash necessary to subsidize an iTunes record label until it found it's footing (and until major artists realized how much iTunes sales really meant to them in this day and age). 100 million iPods aren't just going to disappear overnight, people will still turn to iTunes for their music. So long as they could keep setting the trend with their iPod line, it's hard to believe that an iTunes label would not eventually start scoring major artists, or perhaps start creating their own major artists from little known artists/bands eager to sign with the iTunes label.
No they killed it for the right reasons, I assure you. If some disabled individuals were using Glider to play WoW that's fine, but does not excuse Glider giving the vast, vast majority of it's users the ability to "game the system" as it were, allowing them to gain vast amounts of gold/items/honor with little or no effort. WoW does have it's own, extensive macro system that would probably allow for some level of play by many who are disabled. Certainly it cannot accommodate everyone, but this is something that is unreasonable to expect, by your own admission further down this thread.
It's unfortunate, but you really have to look at this from the perspective of "how might a program that helps disabled people play the game be abused by those not disabled?" If you design a program to help automate your gameplay in Kings Quest or any other single player game, if someone chooses to use it just to "cheat" or make the game simpler, they're only affecting their own play. In an MMO however, the abuses one might perpetuate via an automation program - namely mob tagging/stealing/constant killing or gold/item/honor farming - affects other players as well.
Perhaps Blizzard does need to be more aware/do more to help disabled people play their game, not being disabled myself I can't really speak to that point. But I do think they cannot simply give users the ability to distill the game down to simply pushing a "Go" button, because of the potential for abuse it brings along with it. Again, it's not fair, but not everything can be made equitable for all.
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game
It's not that the computer can play WoW better, it's that it can play it continuously for hours on end. Glider is a farming program primarily. You set it up, go to work or school or whatever, and when you come home you're 2000g richer.
If you used something like Gmail, but "filtered" it again through yourself to make sure nothing unwanted gets through. Say, you setup the kids Gmail, but do not tell them the password or how to get on it via the web, and just set them up a Pop3 client on the computer that will get the mail for them. I think GMail will let you pop in? I do this on my Verizon phone anyway so I assume it's possible, and I don't see my spam folder stuff come down that way. Perhaps in combination with some security on the OS front on your home PC (kids can't log in without getting you, can only use it at certain times, etc) you would have ample time to review what they're getting in their GMail, kill what you don't want to get to them, then allow them to "check their email" via the pop client and (hopefully) still allow them to have at least the feeling of freedom that comes with checking their email and such.
Slashdot Mirror
At 90% confidence the Higgs is ruled out between about 157 and 185 GeV/c^2
Man I am going to win so many bar bets this weekend...
One only has to look at what breeders have done to pure breed dogs over the years to know this is a horrendously bad idea.
As for education spending, I've always said it should be cut and prioritized. The idea that money allocated to education actually goes to educate kids is a sick joke in this country.
I've never understood this thinking. If schools are wastefully spending money allocated to them, you cut the funding, further hurting children?
There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it. Public schools are a favorite whipping boy for those with money/power, and of course the system isn't perfect, but the benefits it provides still far outweigh the negatives. The vast, vast majority of teachers in our public schools are responsible, intelligent people who have a love of teaching and want to positively affect the lives of children, just like the vast, vast majority of children in the public school system are good kids who want to learn and succeed.
We whine and bitch about the dumbing down of America, laugh at Idiocracy becoming real before our eyes, yet funding for schools are reduced or cut at nearly every opportunity, teachers are criminally underpaid and forced to purchase their own paper and other supplies, while simultaneously hearing how lazy and apathetic they are, school districts are ordered to arbitrarily improve test scored or risk losing what little funding they receive, while being given no new resources to purchase the equipment or hire the staff they need. We leave our children to these people for 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, we trust them to educate our young, to feed and care for them, often to act as surrogate parents, all the while giving them the bare minimum required to perform this task, and griping or outright refusing any request for more.
If you have such a problem with the way public education is run, then get involved for fucks sake. Join the PTA, run for a position on your local school board. Find out what it's really like, chances are you'll end up being shocked that these schools do as good a job as they do with what little they have to work with. Pound for pound, you're not going to find a group of people who work harder, care more about their jobs, or complain less about their working conditions than teachers.
You know I have to admit, finding out that there is an MMO out there that supports this level of cooperation, strategy, and espionage is almost shocking. If I was heavily into games like I was a few years back I would definitely be checking this game out.
When will they take over the world? I have to prepare my disembodied head.
My first stop would be back to the store I purchased it from.
Yeah good luck with that. The store isn't going to take it back because it's open box software. You can talk all you want about DRM licenses but the mouth breathers at Best Buy aren't going to care.
Is all that really going to be necessary? People pull old Trash-80's or whatever out of closets and get them to work, and that's been 15-20 years maybe. Assuming the storage is kept cool and dry, I can't see any reason why the hardware wouldn't be usable after 50 years. Maybe throw in some extra RAM and a cloned HD as a just in case (or just two PC's).
As far as power goes, surely standardized power is embedded well enough at this point that at the very least adapters would be available in 50 years. Think about it; you probably wouldn't think twice about trying to plug in an old television from the 50's would you? Unless Vulcan's land tomorrow with a ship full of antimatter reactors I can't see us abandoning 110 anytime soon.
Perhaps the hard drive is using an Infinitely Improbable File System.
Man it really is as bad as the summary makes it.
With the likes of iTunes and Amazon offering DRM-free music that you can play on any device, why would anyone choose the MSN Mobile service?
There may well be people who just want to listen to the track on their mobile alone.
Yeah and there may well be people with severe OCD who purchase music from your store and then immediately delete it because the bits didn't download in the right order, but I wouldn't bet the farm on chasing that demographic.
Jesus, they seem to be basing the whole thing on the hope that they can trick people into thinking they have to buy music from the MSN store if they have a Windows Mobile device. What the hell is that shit about "loyal to MSN". What? If anyone uses MSN it's because it came up by default in IE and they're too stupid to figure out how to change it. My mom might use MSN, but you can be damn sure she's not going to be buying music for her mobile phone anytime soon. Way to know your audience there pal.
Good grief, someone needs to post a 24 hour guard by this guy, Ballmer is going to disappear his ass posthaste.
I don't see what you're griping about, it's perfectly cromulent grammar.
Schools prefer to use Windows because it's what the vast majority of their faculty and staff know, it's what the vast majority of their software runs on, and it's what students will encounter on the vast majority of computers they will use in the real world.
One wonders why they didn't just put Microsoft, Cisco, and Oracle on the list. Jebus, I know all of those companies have hit a rough patch of some kind or another, but do you really think Symantec, VMWare, and freaking McAfee are going down? They as much as admit it in the summaries for each one, pretty much every one says "Highly unlikely" or something to that effect.
Oh noes, it took up almost 2 cm of your screen when you opened Slashdot, and perhaps as much as 3 minutes of your opening morning avoid-work browsing to view the video, however will you recover from such trauma?
Is there an 18 minute gap in the Barney Cam tapes?
Don't like it? Fund your fucking public schools, idiots.
It just needs to realize what it's core consumer group is: people listening in cars.
Let me paint you a picture. I live in Wichita, America. Here are my choices for radio when I drive to work in the morning:
- Local sports show
- Local news show
- Bob and Tom
- Walton and Johnson
- Todd and Tyler
- Kid Cratic
- Local soccer mom-friendly morning zoo team
- Whatever the hell the hip hop and country stations are playing
That's pretty much it. Half those nationalized shows I don't really even have a clue about besides hearing their ads run on the drive home, but that's enough to tell me I want to have nothing to do with them. Even during the day it's not much better. We have a couple of what you would probably call "adult contemporary", a rock station that redefines the term "playlist", and of course the requisite "classic rock" station where I can hear Hot Blooded for the 90th time. The only "alternative" station who would even bother to crack a White Stripes CD once in a while closed up shop in favor of Mexican radio, literally. In other words, Wichita radio is a farking wasteland.
Sat radio was a God-send for me when I got my new vehicle a few months ago. It came with three months of free XM, and even though Lucy played way too much Offspring, it was light years better than the alternative. Since the merger of stations I haven't had time to form much of an opinion, but what I've heard so far sounds pretty much the same to me.
You can talk about iPhone this and iPhone that, but I'm not really willing to buy an iPhone, or any other phone for that matter, just to have streaming radio on me, particularly when the only time I care about the radio is when I'm driving to work, and would rather listen to the car radio anyway. Yes MP3 players and CD's are an alternative too, but even they get stale after a while, especially when you're like me, spending all my free time looking after two newborn girls; I don't really have time anymore to go actively searching for new music I might like.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that the lettuce on the Wendy's Double Stack isn't really that impossibly green and crisp, and the Glade plugin won't instantly make my entire house smell like a rose garden.
It's a commercial people. They have 30 seconds to show you what it can do. It's your responsibility as a consumer to research the product if you're interested in buying it, determine what it's strengths and limitations are. Not just run right out (literally) and buy it because it looked fast and shiny in a commercial.
But that does not mean there is not a problem here.
My mom has taught 1st graders for ~20 years. Back when Power Rangers used to be the shit, she would talk about how these kids would get all riled up playing Power Rangers during recess. When they got back into class, they were still all keyed up from their "fighting" between each other and would always get in trouble.
Does this mean Power Rangers causes violence in children? Of course not. But it does remind us that children can be excitable and impressionable, get caught up in the games they play, and sometimes don't realize when it's time to stop, or take the game too far. What they are doing before they exhibit this behavior is really immaterial: they might do this with a video game, a movie they see, a cartoon, or a couple of sticks they find in the gutter and play "sword fighting" with.
You have to set limits for children. Limit their diet of video games, TV, and other media, and let them know when their behavior related to this media consumption becomes unacceptable. Parenting 101.
Presumably they will eventually release Crysis 2.
Are the pork barrel last minute additions to the $700 billion buyout package for this kind of stuff? NASA doesn't have lobbyists? No congressmen from Florida or Alabama have this kind of pull?
Just because I don't have a fancy "doctorate" or even "college education", doesn't mean you can just dismiss my theories! Einstein didn't go to college after all, look where he ended up!
I'm telling you, my theory is solid. I saw this show on the History Channel the other day that was talking about what kind of propulsion UFO's might use, and it came to me: What would happen if the Earth's magnetic field happened every 780,000 years and 300 days, exactly? That would mean it would happen again in November! Our only hope is to align every source of magnetic material in the world along north-south magnetic lines! I've already done this with my stove, fridge, and just to be safe my wireless network. I encourage all of you to do the same!
I am not crazy people! My scientific theories are backed up by some of the finest dramatization programs the Discovery Channel has to offer!
The fact that music labels don't (or perhaps don't want to) see what they might be doing by forcing Apples hand here is just amazing. What's to stop Apple from getting into the record label business to support iTunes? Like they couldn't sign a thousand acts tomorrow if they promised them prime promotion in the iTunes Music Store? They might not be able to get the big names right away, because of existing contracts or just general reluctance from artists, and they would certainly lose most if not all of their back-catalog, but Apple absolutely does have the kind of capital necessary to pull this off, and a huge built-in market that is essentially tied to their wildly popular distribution mechanism.
Losing big name artists from major labels would certainly hurt iTunes sales, but again, Apple certainly has the kind of cash necessary to subsidize an iTunes record label until it found it's footing (and until major artists realized how much iTunes sales really meant to them in this day and age). 100 million iPods aren't just going to disappear overnight, people will still turn to iTunes for their music. So long as they could keep setting the trend with their iPod line, it's hard to believe that an iTunes label would not eventually start scoring major artists, or perhaps start creating their own major artists from little known artists/bands eager to sign with the iTunes label.
No they killed it for the right reasons, I assure you. If some disabled individuals were using Glider to play WoW that's fine, but does not excuse Glider giving the vast, vast majority of it's users the ability to "game the system" as it were, allowing them to gain vast amounts of gold/items/honor with little or no effort. WoW does have it's own, extensive macro system that would probably allow for some level of play by many who are disabled. Certainly it cannot accommodate everyone, but this is something that is unreasonable to expect, by your own admission further down this thread.
It's unfortunate, but you really have to look at this from the perspective of "how might a program that helps disabled people play the game be abused by those not disabled?" If you design a program to help automate your gameplay in Kings Quest or any other single player game, if someone chooses to use it just to "cheat" or make the game simpler, they're only affecting their own play. In an MMO however, the abuses one might perpetuate via an automation program - namely mob tagging/stealing/constant killing or gold/item/honor farming - affects other players as well.
Perhaps Blizzard does need to be more aware/do more to help disabled people play their game, not being disabled myself I can't really speak to that point. But I do think they cannot simply give users the ability to distill the game down to simply pushing a "Go" button, because of the potential for abuse it brings along with it. Again, it's not fair, but not everything can be made equitable for all.
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game
It's not that the computer can play WoW better, it's that it can play it continuously for hours on end. Glider is a farming program primarily. You set it up, go to work or school or whatever, and when you come home you're 2000g richer.
If you used something like Gmail, but "filtered" it again through yourself to make sure nothing unwanted gets through. Say, you setup the kids Gmail, but do not tell them the password or how to get on it via the web, and just set them up a Pop3 client on the computer that will get the mail for them. I think GMail will let you pop in? I do this on my Verizon phone anyway so I assume it's possible, and I don't see my spam folder stuff come down that way. Perhaps in combination with some security on the OS front on your home PC (kids can't log in without getting you, can only use it at certain times, etc) you would have ample time to review what they're getting in their GMail, kill what you don't want to get to them, then allow them to "check their email" via the pop client and (hopefully) still allow them to have at least the feeling of freedom that comes with checking their email and such.